Primary results continue trend: Ozaukee Co. no longer a GOP stronghold
GRAFTON, Wis. (CBS 58) -- Less than a week ago, the Republican Party of Ozaukee County opened a second office here. This space is dedicated to what county GOP chairman Alex Leykin calls "retail politics," selling merchandise and handing out yard signs.
Lisa Stahl of Mequon stopped by to grab a handful of those signs. Stahl, who said she's lived in the county for 20 years, wanted to push back on a pattern she's noticed in her community.
"I see more Democratic signs than I used to," she said. "Even as recent as the last election."
Election results over the past decade align with Stahl's eyes. Back in 2014, former Gov. Scott Walker cruised to victory against Democratic challenger, Mary Burke. Ozaukee County certainly helped, as Walker captured nearly 70% of the vote here.
Since then, however, the county has trended toward becoming more purple. During the latter half of the 2010s, former President Trump was a bit of an outlier in the county, getting 55.8% of the county's vote in 2016 while other Republicans either reached 60% or came close.
Mr. Trump got 55.2% of the vote in 2020, but in subsequent statewide races, Republicans have fared progressively worse, with the exception of Sen. Ron Johnson, who approached 58% in 2022.
In the spring of 2023, conservative state Supreme Court candidate Dan Kelly barely won the county with 52% of the vote in his landslide loss to Janet Protasiewicz.
In Tuesday's August primary, 53.4% of Ozaukee County voters filled out Republican ballots while 46.3% voted as Democrats. The vote on GOP-written constitutional amendments seeking to give the Legislature control of how Wisconsin spends federal aid was even closer, with 50.1% voting 'yes.'
Marquette University Research Fellow John Johnson compiled an analysis of ward-by-ward results in the Milwaukee metro area. It revealed Ozaukee County is a microcosm of what's happening across Wisconsin: cities leaning more heavily toward Democrats while rural areas turn more deeply Republican.
"Those growing parts of the county, the places where they're building more, are shifting toward the Democrats," Johnson said. "And the more rural areas to the north of the county are moving in the opposite direction."
In Ozaukee County, that's meant cities like Mequon and Port Washington taking turns to the left while the more rural northern half of the county turns a darker shade of red.
Johnson said the party affiliation was likely a more indicative measure of the county's political status as some voters may have been confused by the amendment language or swayed by the big spending edge for Democrats opposing the amendmet.
Still, he noted Republican organizers across the state are singing a familiar tune; it's the one Democrats had often sung until Mr. Trump helped rearrange political allegiances by winning over non-college-educated men while repelling suburban women.
"That's what Democrats always used to say, you know, eight or 10 years ago. They said, 'Oh, it's turnout, turnout, turnout. We need to get our low-propensity voters to the polls,'" Johnson said. "And now, you hear Republicans talking in a similar way."
Leykin said he still believed Ozaukee County is fertile Republican ground. He said it's a matter of turning out people who hold conservative beliefs but are rarely motivated enough to vote.
"We need a much better ground game to chase the vote, as it were," he said. "We have to get the low-propensity voters out, the voters only vote once every six or seven years, but when they do vote, they vote Republican."
Leykin said he believed a slight uptick in GOP support here could signal enough of a shift to win Wisconsin for Mr. Trump and other Republican candidates, including Eric Hovde's bid for Tammy Baldwin's U.S. Senate seat and state Senator Duey Stroebel's effort to hold on in what's expected to a close race against challenger Jodi Habush Sinykin.
"The numbers, the way I've crunched them, personally, we have to hit somewhere around the 56-57% mark in order for it to have an effect statewide," he said.
A stunning shift for Dems
Deb Dassow seemed to still be surprised as she reflected on how support from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin (DPW) has changed over the last three decades.
The chair of Ozaukee Democrats, Dassow recalled meetings in the '90s happening in basements with fewer than 10 people in attendance. She said the state party bristled when the Democratic chapter asked for the slightest show of support.
"When Bill Clinton was running for president, and I had a few friends here in Ozaukee County - I lived in Cedarburg - that wanted yard signs, DPW said, 'Nope, we're not wasting our resources in your county,'" she said.
These days, it's a very different story. Dassow said the state party now has paid personnel helping out on the ground.
"We have a field organizer," she said. "We have a regional organizer. We have an interim organizer. They wouldn't even have considered that [back then.]"
Johnson noted there's no guarantee the trend will continue. After all, political winds do change, and he said it's possible suburban counties like Ozaukee return to being more conservative while rural areas go back to being more evenly divided.
"You know, a lot of these suburbs didn't start trending blue until Donald Trump came and kind of upended the table of who people thought a Republican was in those places," he said.